Does anyone *really* think that computers and the brain work in the same way ? Or even in a significantly similar fashion ?
Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.'
Well, by 'processors', I assume you mean neurons. These are activated to perform a firing sequence on output connections dependent on their input connections and current state, heavily modified by chemistry, propogation time (it's an electrical flow through ion channels, not a copper wire), and (for lack of a better word) weights on the output connections. To compare the processing capacity of one of these to a CPU is ludicrous. On the other hand, the 'several' in the quote above is also ludicrous... "Several" does not generally correspond to circa 100 billion...
No-one has a clear idea of how the brain really processes and stored information. We have models (neural networks), and they're piss-poor ones at that...
There's evidence that the noise-level in the brain is critical - that less noise would make it work worse, and the same for more noise. That the brain uses superposition of signals in time (with constructive interference) as a messaging facility.
There's evidence that temporal behaviour is again critical, that the timing of pulses from neuron to neuron may be the information storage for short-term memory, and that the information is not 'stored' anywhere apart from in the pulse-train.
There's evidence that the transfer functions of neurons can radically change between a number of fixed states over short (millisecond) periods of time. And for other neurons, this doesn't happen. Not all neurons are equal or even close.
Neurons and their connections can enter resonant states, behaving more like waves than anything else - relatively long transmission lines can be set up between 2 neurons in the brain once, and then never again during the observation.
The brain behaves less like a computer and more like a chaotic system of nodes the more you look at it, and yet there is enormous and significant order within the chaos. The book by Kauffman ("The origins of order", I've recommended it before, although it's very mathematical) posits evolution pushing any organism towards the boundary of order and chaos as the best place to be for survival, and the brain itself is the best example of these ideas that I can think of.
Brain : computer is akin to Warp Drive : Internal combustion engine in that they both perform fundamentally the same job, but one is light years ahead of the other.
If I have an idea for a device that hasn't been made before, I can patent the idea then openly market it without fear that someone else will come along and out-muscle me in the marketplace.
It seems to me that the PodBuddy is a blatant copy (presumably it's the second-to-market given the other guys have the patent), with a sexier-looking arm for attaching it to the car. The functionality looks to be identical.
You could argue whether the patent itself ought to have been issued (is it *really* a non-obvious invention?) but I don't think you can argue the patent-holder is doing anything wrong. I don't particularly like the idea of patents (especially software patents), but given we have them, it seems to me this is what they're supposed to be there for....
[grin] You know, I get asked this a lot:-) It was even more weird when I was a sysadmin:-)
No, I'm not. And your account is not terminated, your credit-cards have not been maxed-out, and your car is totally undamaged. At least in some universe...
... and that's the problem. I sold my motorbike on Ebay when I emigrated to the US last year, and was so disgusted with the service, I even wrote a journal entry about it.
Ebay doesn't care if the seller has problems as long as the percentage cut is in Ebay's bank account. They do little-to-nothing to make the seller's life easy, in fact it's a very customer-unfocused setup.
As long as Ebay keep their current modus operandi, I'll not be using them again, and they have to run out of sellers eventually...
Not that I agree with the idea of ID cards, but the data protection act actually helps the general population, not the government.
Any company storing information on you is obliged to register with the data-protection registrar and tell them what class of data they're storing. Any member of the public can ask the DP registrar who is storing info on them, and demand to see it (from the companies, not the DP registrar).
It's actually a royal pain for companies, but well worth it - it means people think twice before storing information, rather than doing it as a default, which is a good thing, yes ?
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment for this story, saying that the company it is not yet ready to reveal product specifications
In other words, the whole thing is based around two facts we already knew: Apple wants to restrict OSX to Apple machines, and there is a chip on the motherboards that can be used for this.
Uh, people, there's a chip in a G5 that can do the same. The server version of OSX is reputed to use it, but I've installed the same OSX DVD on more than one Apple box before...
So, the entire article can be summed up as 'Apple might use DRM to secure their OS'. Whoopy-doo.
Good points all, I think there's a definition of novelty that fits though - If you come up with something that (for example) depends on a new law of physics that you just invented, I think that could be regarded as 'better' than a new type of rubber for tyres that (I dunno) doesn't wear out as fast. They're both new (and I think a patent must be for something genuinely new, not just 'slightly' new).
Perhaps rather than novelty, I mean 'insightful' or even just plain 'impressive'. In other words you get bonus points for being cool [grin]. Hell, this is/., I can reduce things to absurdity if I want to:-) Measurement would be...tricky... in this case. Perhaps ignore the 'novelty' aspect and keep the generality ideas though
What I didn't make clear is that the wide-ranging patents *lose* points in the same way, and I'd consider applying it retroactively. So, all those millions of patents that patent 'everything I can think of,or might in the future be able to think of' would essentially be worthless because they'd last months at most.
Perhaps the patent office says 'from 2015 all currently-active patents must have been through a review and be made subject to the same rules as new ones at that date, and you get between 1 patent/year/employee and 0.1 patents/year/employee depending on company size '. Choose the ones that you want to keep, bearing in mind we're going to be limited on what we can process.
So, all patents go through the bartering process (I'm guessing that they'll be seriously re-written to cover what they *really* want to protect). And from that point on, the patent office is *not* swamped with millions of useless wide-ranging patents.
As for s/w patents - the thing is that I can see a case (yeah Simon, way to make friends and influence people on/. !) for some of them (eg: if I invented PGP, I might want to make some cash out of that). But the deserving ones are a tiny fraction of the completely crap software patents that people are filing.
This was the idea of inverse generality - if your patent is applicable all over the place, you get less protection (the cursor, one-click shopping, anyone?) than if it's the SHA algorithm for encryption. And if you try to patent a class of algorithms, you get less protection-time as well.
I do agree about the patent office problem though. The funny thing is that I own a US patent (for a machine, not s/w:-), and I went through several iterations of the wording until the patent office in the US was satisfied that it was original. The EU and Japan were far easier to convince...
In truth, I was throwing an idea out there off the top of my head. I didn't really expect such a detailed response. I think there's something in the inverse-generality idea though.
Well, I had sort of assumed the 'public' part of the 'arrangement' was taken as read. Obviously not.
So, in the same way as patents are currently disclosed, any arrangements would also be part of the disclosure. There would have to be some sort of overview, which is what I think you're saying - but what's the difference between my suggestion, and the current option '$2000/year if you pass the patent' option that the unscrupulous could offer today ?
So, presumably there is already a checks/balances system in place...
Fortunately (for the rest of the world), that's only the case in the USA. Of course, unless the EU gets its act together and *really* gets to grip with patents (in general, but especially s/w patents) it's curtains for the rest of us as well.
Perhaps a patent ought to have a natural lifetime specific to the patent, which has to be claimed for in the patent application. Give the patent-examiners the right to barter the lifetime of the patent vs the generality, taking novelty into account.
So, a patent has a default lifetime set up on a class basis (for-cars, for chemical-engineering, for software, etc.) and if a patent is truly innovative (in the opinion of the examiner), it gets a longer lifetime to start off with. Then the author and examiner can come to an arrangement ("yes, I'll exclude areas X,Y,Z but I want another 2 years"... "most I'll give you is an extra year for that", etc.)
Default lifetimes for different patents ought to reflect their industy-area (eg: software ought to be very small, say 3-5 years. If someone comes up with transparent aluminium via a novel process, they get 20 years for the process, as it relates to transparent-Al; 10 years if they agree to sell the rights for everything other than Al; or 5 years in general).
This would allow the patent author to decide how to leverage the patent, make them relevant only to what the patent author has thought of (overly-general patents would be useless because of the low time-limit) and still keep the 'reward-a-good-idea' mentality that fosters exploitation of innovation.
It'd require the courts (or perhaps a fair few more patent examiners) to oversee the increased workload, but it would kickstart the various industries again, and all the lawyers currently working on creating patents could work on overseeing them instead:-)
After all, it's reported that Steve Jobs' demo machine sported four such Pentium 4 processors
I've seen this lots of times - WTF? The P4 is not multi-processor capable, you need a Xeon for that. The line in the 'about' box said 'Pentium 4-processor', and the '-' was in the wrong place - it should have said 'Pentium-4 processor', but it *was* a pre-production machine for developers only... this audience is supposed to have a clue...
Another columnist puts up a straw-man argument and then handily batters it down. If only reality were so easy to manipulate, huh ?
I wish there was an objective way of rating columnists, but I really like the 'deathmatch' idea proposed on an earlier/. article - even if only for the comedy value - at least we'd be getting *something* out of the columnist.
"All the news that's fit to print", and a bunch of stuff I just made up...
With the growth in free hardware designs it would be nice if the GPL3 took some note of how it may be applied there as well. There's been a fair amount of debate on how it's inapplicable, which is a shame because many people want to provide their work to the world in this area too.
It's not so different... writing in verilog, compared to writing in 'C' with lots of concurrent threads, and the thrill of getting a working piece of hardware is far more than coding up a cool algorithm, IMHO of course:-) With the price of FPGA's being so low now, it's becoming more and more available. T'would be a shame for the GPL to miss out again.
Excellent - I'll send you my address if you send me your email address.
Xilinx Foundation is unix software, commandline only, that reads a file, processes the contents, and writes a file - stdio + logic, compiled using the same compiler. They deliver linux and XP versions. There's also a gui that wraps the commandline tools for those who need it. I don't.
You also appeared to mis-read my posting - I was running a LINUX version and an XP version - see the part you quoted...
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
1) There are people who respond to this article who keep referring to a Blue Screen Of Death. I haven't seen one of these in about 5 years. This either means that a) the people referring to the BSOD because it's a much talked about windows occurance that was a feature on an OS that is at least 6-7 years old and don't realize that it just doesn't happen on the newer OS's becuase they are a) lying mac fanbois or b) they are using really old windows software and are stupid.
So which category do I fit into then ? Windows XP, fully service-packed and with a single application installed (Xilinx Foundation, approx $2500, it's all I use the machine for), BSOD yesterday after running a place-and-route for approx 10 hours. I would have used the linux box but it has been busy running a similar PAR for about 2.5 days now. Identical machines, same software, one crashes, the other just carries on working...
2) People are assuming that since a seemingly impartial source is pulling a number out of their ass, it must be accurate.
No, you're assuming they're assuming that. I read it as 'hey, these guys *aren't* paid to lie - fancy that!'. The truth (or lack thereof) of the article rests on its merits.
3) People actually think that the MAC is impervious to virii and malware. Anyone ever take a root kit and run it on the mac? Works quite nicely. I've never seen a virus for the PC as powerful as a r00tkit for *nix. Someone with a little programming experience and the ability to execute a script can write a virus for the mac. Quite easily. Mac folks, you day is coming. Enjoy it while it lasts.
It works quite nicely, how ? Do you have any example rootkits that work remotely ? As far as I'm aware, a rootkit is only a threat when it can be installed remotely via an exploitable hole in the system. If you have root access to the system, you don't need a rootkit to make it vulnerable! Just as a data-point, linux rootkits won't work on a mac, for the obvious reason that they're running very different software and potential exploits will therefore be different!
4) People don't seem to understand that Windows is no Mac is no Linux. They are not interchangable. I have a Mac and I have a Windows Box. I love OSX. I love the look and the feel. What I don't love is the amazing lack of software to do anything that interest me that I Can't already do on an XP box. Outside of Photoshop and Final Cut, the 64 Bit Opteron beats the crap out of the G5 hands down for abou half the price. I'm still looking for a FREE Ftp program for my MAC other than the command line. WTF people?
Well, this is down to personal taste of course, but I tend to use commandline ftp even on a windows box... I'm a unix-orientated guy and that's the way I prefer to work. OTOH, you can just type 'ftp://user@host' into the 'Finder->Go -> Connect to server' dialogue box and it'll open up the directory just like any other Finder window. It works the same way for 'smb:', 'nfs:', 'afp:' etc. etc.
Sure, XP has *more* software, and there are a few areas where the Mac still lacks (eg: EDA, hence the XP box), but for the 90% of people who don't fall into that category, it's there waiting for the taking.
5) I appreciate that people are idealistic and are willing to make decisions based on some screwy ideal they have about what they think makes a better world, OS, et al. But being idealistic doesn't mean that you are automatically right and in a better place morally. In most cases, you are just a simple minded ecentric that people don't understand and therefore are given the street cred that you are "edgy", "cutting edge" and "visionary". It's one reason most folks group MAC users in with the Vegans, Goths, and Envrio-freaks. Face it, you're just a little wacky and think you can actually change the world with a rhyme and a different point of view. Y
*Sigh* Just because you want more from (whoever, Apple in this case), it doesn't give you the right to demand more than is required by the terms of any given contract or licence. It certainly doesn't give you the right to accuse them of breaking those terms when you're fully aware that they haven't.
I'm assuming you're fully aware because of the enormous hoo-haa that developed when the story first broke... No-one (not Apple (!), not the KHTML team, not anyone even remotely informed) claimed that the licence terms were being broken. The claim was that Apple ought to have been complying more with the spirit of the licence than the letter of it.
Frankly I think it cheapens the GPL when it's abused as in the OP's subject. The standard response to companies who *do* abuse it is that they ought to have read the licence and not assumed they could just take and not give. The standard response to people who, like Oliver Twist, say "but I want more" ought to be in the same vein - the GPL is what it is and it's a damn fine licence. Use it, don't abuse it.
Cocoa is written in Objective C, which is very much a compiled-to-machine-code language. It has Java bindings as well, but they're not the prime target. Objective C has runtime binding to its objects' methods (selectors) but there's no bytecode involved, as far as I know!
aside: ObjC is a gorgeous language - sufficiently simple that C programmers "just get it" immediately, and without the horrendous baggage that is the cruft of C++. It comes with a nice standard library (the NS... class set) that mirrors the java ones in many respects, but it compiles to almost-as-fast-as-C++ code (the runtime binding takes a toll). About the only thing that puts people off is the odd syntax for method declarations and method calls. Even that becomes second-nature after a while.
Considering the language is so old now, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more - it does make development very rapid (akin to Java), but without the speed issues...
School is a public place. Parents (whose money is being spent) probably do have the right to know how that money is spent, and if it brings to light that a child is being bullied out of lunch-money sooner, that can't be anything other than a good thing.
But I worry about the seeds being sown, and the harvest we will reap. When a child is constantly being placed under surveillance in different circumstances, and knowingly so, it will tend towards the 'norm' of that child's cultural world. It will become accepted rather than questioned - what are the benefits? What are the costs? Is it worth it ? I fear for a future when the question is not 'why are we under surveillance?', but 'why are you not watching out for XXX?'.
"They" (and by 'they', I mean 'we') are sucking the lifeblood out of personal freedom, one pinprick and one drop of blood at a time. More and more freedom is being just handed over, and the responsibility that went with that freedom dies a little too. Without the responsibility for actions taken, there is no choice in life - welcome to the herd mentality, and kiss goodbye to that magnificence of spirit - individuality.
Quite a leap from telling parents about their childrens lunching habits, but as Francis Xavier said "Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards". Young minds are receptive minds, and missionaries tend to understand indoctrination better than most.
Sorry - we're going to disagree on this one [grin] BTW I recognise that what I want is not what everyone wants - I'm not quite that megalomaniac:-)
It's reasonable to assume that the coffee would be served around the temperature it was meant to be drunk at.
Well, not really, at least, not really IMHO. When someone (even a friend) passes me a hot drink they've just made, I'll take a cautious little sip, to see if it's too hot to drink - I don't just assume they've made it at the right temperature. If I take a *small* sip, and it's too hot, the spit in my mouth can amortise the heat easily, and I don't get burnt.
The point is that I don't even trust my friends to get this right - why would I assume some random company would look after my welfare any more ? Common sense dictates I act with caution first...
It's reasonable to assume that if it's served in a container that might spill, that spillage would not result in severe burns.
Again, not really. If I place (and leave) my hand in a boiling kettle, I would expect severe (as in, skin-graft-type) burns. If I transfer that boiling water into a cup and dip (and leave) my index finger in the cup, I would similarly expect sever burns on my finger. I therefore expect that if I spill boiling hot liquid, it will burn me and I treat the cup with a measure of respect.
I do *not* try to balance the cup of boiling hot water on top of my head, I do *not* attempt to juggle with lots of said cups, and I do *not* place the fragile cup full of boiling hot water between my thighs and start to drive. Any of those things would appear ludicrous to me. Perhaps I'm alone in that.
Your example *is* exaggerated and contrived, no-one has died from hot coffee yet, AFAIK. I guess the difference between our arguments is where the blame lies - you claim the makers (McD's) ought to have either warned or done differently. I claim the user (said unfortunate woman) didn't show enough common sense to warrant winning a court case.
I guess what I'm really asking for is for people in general to take ownership of their lives, to face up to the fact that it's not always someone else's fault, and that "who can I sue" ought not be the first question asked.
I think that not every possible misuse (of anything) ought to be pre-catered for (no pun intended) by the makers. I guess I'm saying that the theshold for suing someone ought to be placed higher than it appears to be currently - and I guess that's where we disagree:-)
And you know what - I don't care that they admitted that. I *expect* the coffee to be boiling hot - hot enough to scald me that is, because I want it hot when I get back to my office. Once it's got to 'hot enough to hurt if drunk' (boiling hot), I don't care how much hotter it gets. I have this foolproof method for drinking it without huting myself - I wait for it to cool down.
Would the lady in question have boiled a kettle and then poured the scalding-hot water all over her thighs ? No ? Well then she has no case. She clearly knows that coffee (made with water straight from a boiling kettle) will hurt her - the fault was at least as much hers as McD's so she should have got nothing and taken it as a lesson in what not to do in future. If in fact she'd made it public, admitted she'd screwed up, and tried to warn others *without* trying to sue, I'd have a lot more sympathy - but in this case greed won out and she realised (with the state of US courts being as they are) it was a golden opportunity to milk a cash cow...
There was a woman just recently awarded $45,000 because her cat was killed by a dog. What the hell is going on here ? Dogs kill cats. It's a shame. Get over it.
I'm sick of this culture of blame and blood-sucking lawyers. She screwed up, and she wants someone to blame. The 'nanny' state/courts are rapidly taking us towards a position where pretty much anyone will be able to sue pretty much anyone else for pretty much anything, and it's got to stop.
If you can't grok calculus, you are never (repeat: never) going to get 'the more advanced theories of physics'.
The ideas behind calculus aren't that hard to understand, but teaching them is a skill - most teachers I've seen tend to just explain the ideas then hope sufficient example problems will do their job for them. It's a lot easier if you learn to derive the basics (d/dx, integral around a path, partial differentials etc.) from first principles - it's not that you'll use the first-principles approach ever, but the understanding is worth the learning pain.
To give another datapoint on Physics' needs: I recall my first college term as a physics undergrad - we had a "basic primer" in maths (a 4 week course) which was essentially the 'A' level Further-Mathematics syllabus. Those unfortunates who hadn't done further-maths (about 50% of people) were a bit shell-shocked by the end of the primer course. Once that was out of the way, we got into the meaty stuff that you need for a Physics BSc. Most of us had to work damned hard to grok that - integrating partial differential tensors, residues, integral transforms... yuk. And doing it was only half the battle - you had to know *when* to do it...
I guess the point I'm labouring to say is that some stuff is just complicated - irreduceably so. If you remove the complexity, you remove the understanding and therefore the whole point.
It all comes down to the fact that most people can't accept the simple truth that you're born, you live, you die, that's it.
All the rest is a tribute to human imagination, or the result of a vested interest of anyone in a position of power within any given religious movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone *really* think that computers and the brain work in the same way ? Or even in a significantly similar fashion ?
Well, by 'processors', I assume you mean neurons. These are activated to perform a firing sequence on output connections dependent on their input connections and current state, heavily modified by chemistry, propogation time (it's an electrical flow through ion channels, not a copper wire), and (for lack of a better word) weights on the output connections. To compare the processing capacity of one of these to a CPU is ludicrous. On the other hand, the 'several' in the quote above is also ludicrous... "Several" does not generally correspond to circa 100 billion...
No-one has a clear idea of how the brain really processes and stored information. We have models (neural networks), and they're piss-poor ones at that...
The brain behaves less like a computer and more like a chaotic system of nodes the more you look at it, and yet there is enormous and significant order within the chaos. The book by Kauffman ("The origins of order", I've recommended it before, although it's very mathematical) posits evolution pushing any organism towards the boundary of order and chaos as the best place to be for survival, and the brain itself is the best example of these ideas that I can think of.
Brain : computer is akin to Warp Drive : Internal combustion engine in that they both perform fundamentally the same job, but one is light years ahead of the other.
Simon.
... and did you even *read* what I wrote, or was it just a knee-jerk reaction of "Hey, man, he sayz patents good. Letsgettim"
Jeez. Disagreeing with the opinion of a post is *not* why something is a troll post. Worrawanker.
Simon
If I have an idea for a device that hasn't been made before, I can patent the idea then openly market it without fear that someone else will come along and out-muscle me in the marketplace.
It seems to me that the PodBuddy is a blatant copy (presumably it's the second-to-market given the other guys have the patent), with a sexier-looking arm for attaching it to the car. The functionality looks to be identical.
You could argue whether the patent itself ought to have been issued (is it *really* a non-obvious invention?) but I don't think you can argue the patent-holder is doing anything wrong. I don't particularly like the idea of patents (especially software patents), but given we have them, it seems to me this is what they're supposed to be there for....
Simon
[grin] You know, I get asked this a lot :-) It was even more weird when I was a sysadmin :-)
:-)
No, I'm not. And your account is not terminated, your credit-cards have not been maxed-out, and your car is totally undamaged. At least in some universe...
Simon. (Bet you go and check...
... and that's the problem. I sold my motorbike on Ebay when I emigrated to the US last year, and was so disgusted with the service, I even wrote a journal entry about it.
Ebay doesn't care if the seller has problems as long as the percentage cut is in Ebay's bank account. They do little-to-nothing to make the seller's life easy, in fact it's a very customer-unfocused setup.
As long as Ebay keep their current modus operandi, I'll not be using them again, and they have to run out of sellers eventually...
Simon
Not that I agree with the idea of ID cards, but the data protection act actually helps the general population, not the government.
Any company storing information on you is obliged to register with the data-protection registrar and tell them what class of data they're storing. Any member of the public can ask the DP registrar who is storing info on them, and demand to see it (from the companies, not the DP registrar).
It's actually a royal pain for companies, but well worth it - it means people think twice before storing information, rather than doing it as a default, which is a good thing, yes ?
Simon
According to TFA...
In other words, the whole thing is based around two facts we already knew: Apple wants to restrict OSX to Apple machines, and there is a chip on the motherboards that can be used for this.
Uh, people, there's a chip in a G5 that can do the same. The server version of OSX is reputed to use it, but I've installed the same OSX DVD on more than one Apple box before...
So, the entire article can be summed up as 'Apple might use DRM to secure their OS'. Whoopy-doo.
Simon
Good points all, I think there's a definition of novelty that fits though - If you come up with something that (for example) depends on a new law of physics that you just invented, I think that could be regarded as 'better' than a new type of rubber for tyres that (I dunno) doesn't wear out as fast. They're both new (and I think a patent must be for something genuinely new, not just 'slightly' new).
/., I can reduce things to absurdity if I want to :-) Measurement would be ...tricky... in this case. Perhaps ignore the 'novelty' aspect and keep the generality ideas though
/. !) for some of them (eg: if I invented PGP, I might want to make some cash out of that). But the deserving ones are a tiny fraction of the completely crap software patents that people are filing.
:-), and I went through several iterations of the wording until the patent office in the US was satisfied that it was original. The EU and Japan were far easier to convince...
Perhaps rather than novelty, I mean 'insightful' or even just plain 'impressive'. In other words you get bonus points for being cool [grin]. Hell, this is
What I didn't make clear is that the wide-ranging patents *lose* points in the same way, and I'd consider applying it retroactively. So, all those millions of patents that patent 'everything I can think of,or might in the future be able to think of' would essentially be worthless because they'd last months at most.
Perhaps the patent office says 'from 2015 all currently-active patents must have been through a review and be made subject to the same rules as new ones at that date, and you get between 1 patent/year/employee and 0.1 patents/year/employee depending on company size '. Choose the ones that you want to keep, bearing in mind we're going to be limited on what we can process.
So, all patents go through the bartering process (I'm guessing that they'll be seriously re-written to cover what they *really* want to protect). And from that point on, the patent office is *not* swamped with millions of useless wide-ranging patents.
As for s/w patents - the thing is that I can see a case (yeah Simon, way to make friends and influence people on
This was the idea of inverse generality - if your patent is applicable all over the place, you get less protection (the cursor, one-click shopping, anyone?) than if it's the SHA algorithm for encryption. And if you try to patent a class of algorithms, you get less protection-time as well.
I do agree about the patent office problem though. The funny thing is that I own a US patent (for a machine, not s/w
In truth, I was throwing an idea out there off the top of my head. I didn't really expect such a detailed response. I think there's something in the inverse-generality idea though.
Simon
Well, I had sort of assumed the 'public' part of the 'arrangement' was taken as read. Obviously not.
So, in the same way as patents are currently disclosed, any arrangements would also be part of the disclosure. There would have to be some sort of overview, which is what I think you're saying - but what's the difference between my suggestion, and the current option '$2000/year if you pass the patent' option that the unscrupulous could offer today ?
So, presumably there is already a checks/balances system in place...
Simon
Fortunately (for the rest of the world), that's only the case in the USA. Of course, unless the EU gets its act together and *really* gets to grip with patents (in general, but especially s/w patents) it's curtains for the rest of us as well.
... "most I'll give you is an extra year for that", etc.)
:-)
Perhaps a patent ought to have a natural lifetime specific to the patent, which has to be claimed for in the patent application. Give the patent-examiners the right to barter the lifetime of the patent vs the generality, taking novelty into account.
So, a patent has a default lifetime set up on a class basis (for-cars, for chemical-engineering, for software, etc.) and if a patent is truly innovative (in the opinion of the examiner), it gets a longer lifetime to start off with. Then the author and examiner can come to an arrangement ("yes, I'll exclude areas X,Y,Z but I want another 2 years"
Default lifetimes for different patents ought to reflect their industy-area (eg: software ought to be very small, say 3-5 years. If someone comes up with transparent aluminium via a novel process, they get 20 years for the process, as it relates to transparent-Al; 10 years if they agree to sell the rights for everything other than Al; or 5 years in general).
This would allow the patent author to decide how to leverage the patent, make them relevant only to what the patent author has thought of (overly-general patents would be useless because of the low time-limit) and still keep the 'reward-a-good-idea' mentality that fosters exploitation of innovation.
It'd require the courts (or perhaps a fair few more patent examiners) to oversee the increased workload, but it would kickstart the various industries again, and all the lawyers currently working on creating patents could work on overseeing them instead
Simon
I've seen this lots of times - WTF? The P4 is not multi-processor capable, you need a Xeon for that. The line in the 'about' box said 'Pentium 4-processor', and the '-' was in the wrong place - it should have said 'Pentium-4 processor', but it *was* a pre-production machine for developers only... this audience is supposed to have a clue...
Simon
Another columnist puts up a straw-man argument and then handily batters it down. If only reality were so easy to manipulate, huh ?
/. article - even if only for the comedy value - at least we'd be getting *something* out of the columnist.
I wish there was an objective way of rating columnists, but I really like the 'deathmatch' idea proposed on an earlier
"All the news that's fit to print", and a bunch of stuff I just made up...
Simon
With the growth in free hardware designs it would be nice if the GPL3 took some note of how it may be applied there as well. There's been a fair amount of debate on how it's inapplicable, which is a shame because many people want to provide their work to the world in this area too.
:-) With the price of FPGA's being so low now, it's becoming more and more available. T'would be a shame for the GPL to miss out again.
It's not so different... writing in verilog, compared to writing in 'C' with lots of concurrent threads, and the thrill of getting a working piece of hardware is far more than coding up a cool algorithm, IMHO of course
Simon.
Gaah.... s/on/o/ fabitch
Preview, not Submit. Preview, not Submit...
... along with the podcasting updates that'll make iTunes even more popular, but for some reason things like this were skipped over :-)
Simon.
Excellent - I'll send you my address if you send me your email address.
Xilinx Foundation is unix software, commandline only, that reads a file, processes the contents, and writes a file - stdio + logic, compiled using the same compiler. They deliver linux and XP versions. There's also a gui that wraps the commandline tools for those who need it. I don't.
You also appeared to mis-read my posting - I was running a LINUX version and an XP version - see the part you quoted...
Simon.
... according to the developers docs on the apple home-page, Intel-based macs will not use openfirmware, also:
i gns+with+Intel+-+page+2/2100-7341_3-5733756-2.html ?tag=st.next
from cnet today:
http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the+switch%2C+al
--------------
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
So which category do I fit into then ? Windows XP, fully service-packed and with a single application installed (Xilinx Foundation, approx $2500, it's all I use the machine for), BSOD yesterday after running a place-and-route for approx 10 hours. I would have used the linux box but it has been busy running a similar PAR for about 2.5 days now. Identical machines, same software, one crashes, the other just carries on working...
No, you're assuming they're assuming that. I read it as 'hey, these guys *aren't* paid to lie - fancy that!'. The truth (or lack thereof) of the article rests on its merits.
It works quite nicely, how ? Do you have any example rootkits that work remotely ? As far as I'm aware, a rootkit is only a threat when it can be installed remotely via an exploitable hole in the system. If you have root access to the system, you don't need a rootkit to make it vulnerable! Just as a data-point, linux rootkits won't work on a mac, for the obvious reason that they're running very different software and potential exploits will therefore be different!
Well, this is down to personal taste of course, but I tend to use commandline ftp even on a windows box... I'm a unix-orientated guy and that's the way I prefer to work. OTOH, you can just type 'ftp://user@host' into the 'Finder->Go -> Connect to server' dialogue box and it'll open up the directory just like any other Finder window. It works the same way for 'smb:', 'nfs:', 'afp:' etc. etc.
Sure, XP has *more* software, and there are a few areas where the Mac still lacks (eg: EDA, hence the XP box), but for the 90% of people who don't fall into that category, it's there waiting for the taking.
*Sigh* Just because you want more from (whoever, Apple in this case), it doesn't give you the right to demand more than is required by the terms of any given contract or licence. It certainly doesn't give you the right to accuse them of breaking those terms when you're fully aware that they haven't.
I'm assuming you're fully aware because of the enormous hoo-haa that developed when the story first broke... No-one (not Apple (!), not the KHTML team, not anyone even remotely informed) claimed that the licence terms were being broken. The claim was that Apple ought to have been complying more with the spirit of the licence than the letter of it.
Frankly I think it cheapens the GPL when it's abused as in the OP's subject. The standard response to companies who *do* abuse it is that they ought to have read the licence and not assumed they could just take and not give. The standard response to people who, like Oliver Twist, say "but I want more" ought to be in the same vein - the GPL is what it is and it's a damn fine licence. Use it, don't abuse it.
Simon.
Say what ?
Cocoa is written in Objective C, which is very much a compiled-to-machine-code language. It has Java bindings as well, but they're not the prime target. Objective C has runtime binding to its objects' methods (selectors) but there's no bytecode involved, as far as I know!
aside: ObjC is a gorgeous language - sufficiently simple that C programmers "just get it" immediately, and without the horrendous baggage that is the cruft of C++. It comes with a nice standard library (the NS... class set) that mirrors the java ones in many respects, but it compiles to almost-as-fast-as-C++ code (the runtime binding takes a toll). About the only thing that puts people off is the odd syntax for method declarations and method calls. Even that becomes second-nature after a while.
Considering the language is so old now, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more - it does make development very rapid (akin to Java), but without the speed issues...
Simon
School is a public place. Parents (whose money is being spent) probably do have the right to know how that money is spent, and if it brings to light that a child is being bullied out of lunch-money sooner, that can't be anything other than a good thing.
But I worry about the seeds being sown, and the harvest we will reap. When a child is constantly being placed under surveillance in different circumstances, and knowingly so, it will tend towards the 'norm' of that child's cultural world. It will become accepted rather than questioned - what are the benefits? What are the costs? Is it worth it ? I fear for a future when the question is not 'why are we under surveillance?', but 'why are you not watching out for XXX?'.
"They" (and by 'they', I mean 'we') are sucking the lifeblood out of personal freedom, one pinprick and one drop of blood at a time. More and more freedom is being just handed over, and the responsibility that went with that freedom dies a little too. Without the responsibility for actions taken, there is no choice in life - welcome to the herd mentality, and kiss goodbye to that magnificence of spirit - individuality.
Quite a leap from telling parents about their childrens lunching habits, but as Francis Xavier said "Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards". Young minds are receptive minds, and missionaries tend to understand indoctrination better than most.
Simon
Well, not really, at least, not really IMHO. When someone (even a friend) passes me a hot drink they've just made, I'll take a cautious little sip, to see if it's too hot to drink - I don't just assume they've made it at the right temperature. If I take a *small* sip, and it's too hot, the spit in my mouth can amortise the heat easily, and I don't get burnt.
The point is that I don't even trust my friends to get this right - why would I assume some random company would look after my welfare any more ? Common sense dictates I act with caution first...
Again, not really. If I place (and leave) my hand in a boiling kettle, I would expect severe (as in, skin-graft-type) burns. If I transfer that boiling water into a cup and dip (and leave) my index finger in the cup, I would similarly expect sever burns on my finger. I therefore expect that if I spill boiling hot liquid, it will burn me and I treat the cup with a measure of respect.
I do *not* try to balance the cup of boiling hot water on top of my head, I do *not* attempt to juggle with lots of said cups, and I do *not* place the fragile cup full of boiling hot water between my thighs and start to drive. Any of those things would appear ludicrous to me. Perhaps I'm alone in that.
Your example *is* exaggerated and contrived, no-one has died from hot coffee yet, AFAIK. I guess the difference between our arguments is where the blame lies - you claim the makers (McD's) ought to have either warned or done differently. I claim the user (said unfortunate woman) didn't show enough common sense to warrant winning a court case.
I guess what I'm really asking for is for people in general to take ownership of their lives, to face up to the fact that it's not always someone else's fault, and that "who can I sue" ought not be the first question asked.
I think that not every possible misuse (of anything) ought to be pre-catered for (no pun intended) by the makers. I guess I'm saying that the theshold for suing someone ought to be placed higher than it appears to be currently - and I guess that's where we disagree
Simon
And you know what - I don't care that they admitted that. I *expect* the coffee to be boiling hot - hot enough to scald me that is, because I want it hot when I get back to my office. Once it's got to 'hot enough to hurt if drunk' (boiling hot), I don't care how much hotter it gets. I have this foolproof method for drinking it without huting myself - I wait for it to cool down.
Would the lady in question have boiled a kettle and then poured the scalding-hot water all over her thighs ? No ? Well then she has no case. She clearly knows that coffee (made with water straight from a boiling kettle) will hurt her - the fault was at least as much hers as McD's so she should have got nothing and taken it as a lesson in what not to do in future. If in fact she'd made it public, admitted she'd screwed up, and tried to warn others *without* trying to sue, I'd have a lot more sympathy - but in this case greed won out and she realised (with the state of US courts being as they are) it was a golden opportunity to milk a cash cow...
There was a woman just recently awarded $45,000 because her cat was killed by a dog. What the hell is going on here ? Dogs kill cats. It's a shame. Get over it.
I'm sick of this culture of blame and blood-sucking lawyers. She screwed up, and she wants someone to blame. The 'nanny' state/courts are rapidly taking us towards a position where pretty much anyone will be able to sue pretty much anyone else for pretty much anything, and it's got to stop.
Simon
If you can't grok calculus, you are never (repeat: never) going to get 'the more advanced theories of physics'.
... yuk. And doing it was only half the battle - you had to know *when* to do it...
The ideas behind calculus aren't that hard to understand, but teaching them is a skill - most teachers I've seen tend to just explain the ideas then hope sufficient example problems will do their job for them. It's a lot easier if you learn to derive the basics (d/dx, integral around a path, partial differentials etc.) from first principles - it's not that you'll use the first-principles approach ever, but the understanding is worth the learning pain.
To give another datapoint on Physics' needs: I recall my first college term as a physics undergrad - we had a "basic primer" in maths (a 4 week course) which was essentially the 'A' level Further-Mathematics syllabus. Those unfortunates who hadn't done further-maths (about 50% of people) were a bit shell-shocked by the end of the primer course. Once that was out of the way, we got into the meaty stuff that you need for a Physics BSc. Most of us had to work damned hard to grok that - integrating partial differential tensors, residues, integral transforms
I guess the point I'm labouring to say is that some stuff is just complicated - irreduceably so. If you remove the complexity, you remove the understanding and therefore the whole point.
Simon
It all comes down to the fact that most people can't accept the simple truth that you're born, you live, you die, that's it.
All the rest is a tribute to human imagination, or the result of a vested interest of anyone in a position of power within any given religious movement.
Get over it, for Christ's sake (pun intended
Simon.